Had been to SP road in the afternoon today. Spent almost 5 hours there. Was tight on budget, so shopped carefully. But bought some very interesting stuff:

1. Top on the list is my brand new Raspberry pi board. This is the first one, and as of writing this post, I am already setting up XBMC media center on that and next will be moving the home automation server on to that. Will put up a separate thread on how it goes and some tutorials. Unfortunately 25$ board cost 3200 INR. Which is more then double the price. Sometimes its just tough being a maker in India.

2. I bought a power screw driver, so that fitting the home automation xbee boards wont leave me with a sore hand anymore.

4. Oh! I finally managed to get me electronics work bench “Helping hands”, they will make my life much much much easier now. Everyone who works electronics should have couple of them. Uptill now I was using self made ones. They were crude but served the purpose. I will post some picutres soon, so that it could be useful for someone.

5. Bought and replaced my HTC Incredible’s micro USB power port. When I had enquired at HTC service center, they had given me an exhorbiant price. I did it much cheaper. The port cost me 350 bucks and another 100 bucks to have it replaced at a local service booth at SP road. I could have saved the 100 if I had done it myself, but thats ok.

Myth busted. I am running 23 xbee’s now on the same channel. There is a little noise, but not devastating as suggested in professional forums. Ofcourse I had to do a lot of tweaking, to achieve this. I re-did all my Python code, Pradeep re-did the whole PHP code. In short a complete asynchronous model running off Redis. Its awesome, what my little home automation project has become now.

Currently working on data mining, computer vision and learning and speech integration into the project. Oh yes! whole home audio, video integration done too. My small home automation is turning into a butt kicking awesome system.

As promised I am actively working on the wiki and open source details for my Home Automation project. Soon I will be posting about them. But right now, here is a teaser and a very high level overview of the system that I have developed.

I moved the whole system from mysql to REDIS. It has had its share of pro’s and cons. Mysql was more flexible when it came to searching data from the database. Redis sucks at this front, only direct access allowed or you have to loop through your data structures to match/find data. But other wise performance is very very high, and the no. of lines of code have decreased by about 50 %.

Moving to redis also meant that I had to recode all core modules. It took me 2 weeks to re-code. Its done but still has a few glitches, like the “on/off” system has trouble with threading model I am using now. Check_request wont run at all in background. But runs well in fore-ground. Will fix it tonight.

I finished implementing the temperature sensors, I used LM 35 as they were the only ones available. Still need to attach the xbee’s in Bedrooms and bath rooms. Also need to attach the door and water sensors. Need to modify code so that it dynamcially reconfigures XBEEE pin information and new xbee’s coming up. And need to enable 128 bit encryption on the xbees for security.

I end up working until early morning, yet its so little time. Only if I could work whole day on my project !

My raid gave in. The WD disk is still going good in the raid. But the seagate disks died. Both of them ! at the same time! as soon as the warranty period was over! Its like there was a timer in there somewhere.

Any ways, yesterday I went to SP road and replaced all the seagate drives with WD drives. It cost me a hand and a leg, but hopefully I will not be reinstalling the system for next couple of years.

This has hit my home automation project time lines by couple of weeks

-UPDATE: I finally succeeded in opening up the old hard disks and scourging all parts, the motor and the ND magnets were the best spoils of the war. I build wind chimes out of the rest and they sound really good. I will post a picture soon.

I discarded the rf based automation efforts and stuck to xbee in the end. Currently the whole system dployess xbee in mesh and encrypted, no additional micro controller used, just using the XBEE IO’s, its working great.

Now I need to create a wiki and a correct blog for my home automation. Will update soon on how it goes.

It has been a long journey indeed. In January I decided I need to re-visit the reason I have struggled to build my own house for around 12 years now. It has been a painful struggle. But after the house was finished and I moved in, on August 18th 2011, my birthday :-). I had the most happiest and memorable birthday of my entire life.

I kept busy with continuing house work until November. But after the last labors left me alone with my house. I still found myself in the midst of a hectic life. But somewhere in the back of my mind I kept telling myself, I had run out of excuses, and I needed to start work on my dream project soon.

Building this home automation isn’t just a hobby or passion, its my dream. Now that my primary responsibilities are done towards my family, it’s time to realize my dream.

After a long gap of around 15 years, I held a soldering iron again somewhere in January. It was a rush seeing the solder melt, and fumes choke me. I cried, well almost, mostly from the stupid fumes from the stone dried flux 🙂

But it took me back to my days, when I could solder a radio out of murthy uncle’s electronics shop throwaways. I was excited and wanted to start building my rocket to moon. There I realized I was sitting on an empty bench with nothing more than a soldering iron and a flux dibbi. I had to hit SP road and buy me all those wonderful beautiful instruments, with those blinking lights and Chinese flashy colors. But weekend was still long way and my office schedule won’t let me take a breathing break until then. So instead I sat down and started planning my first version of HOME AUTOMATION hardware. I never got down using the hardware setup because of its some very stupid and silly draw backs. But I am sure; if I spend a weekend on it I can make it usable for this purpose. I am going to post them still, maybe someday someone looking in here might be able to pick them up and finish them. That is may be, if I don’t get to it earlier on some boring long weekend.